Miasma

Help Titus Tremulus escape from a dangerous cave!

Oh no! Titus Tremulus, the trepid cave explorer, has stumbled upon a malignant nebula of noxious miasma! Can you help him reach the open air before the cloud of virulent vapour catches up with him?

An odd blend of a dungeon crawler and a deck building game. Play with the mouse or the number keys. Rules are explained in-game; just hover over things to get some help.

Seed 0 is good to start with. Most of the other seeds turn out to be harder. There are 12 card types in total, most of them more powerful than the starting deck. So if at first you don't succeed, try again!

Made with Godot, Aseprite, Gimp, Audacity, and LMMS.

Voting results

Overall
2nd
7%
7.923
Graphics
7th
43%
6.769
Audio
4th
21%
7.538
Gameplay
2nd
7%
7.692
Originality
1st
8.769
Theme
1st
8.462

This game entered in the Solo competition (14 entries).

Comments (17)

DiningPhilosopher
 • 3 years ago • 

Love it! The condition for ending your turn is very clever, making you think about walking into walls to e.g. avoid landing on a spike, get pickups or just make progress faster. Some cards are way more powerful than others but it's part of the fun to get a good roll I suppose :-) Like the rotation, a flipper (left-right and up-down) would be nice too I think, and even more useful since you very rarely want to go back, and mostly forward.

kdrnic
 • 3 years ago • 

Excellent entry, very creative!
I managed to get to safety in seed 0, my tip is to get as many forward cards as possible

heyheyhey
 • 3 years ago • 

A good use of Godot. Top-notch scores for Audio and Theme. Overall, a solid game. I just wish there were more right-arrows, or more cards for speeding up movement. I played twice and was overtaken by miasma both times. Even so, I had fun playing. A good strategy game.

kdrnic
 • 3 years ago • 

I also finished seeds 1,2,3, great replay value

Papaver
 • 3 years ago • 

Great game, quite addictive! I like how the order in which you play the cards can matter quite much, because the player is forced to play all the movement cards left in their hand. Well done!

euske
 • 3 years ago • 

Very original. Keeps you in suspense. Good job!

Kesslwovv
 • 3 years ago • 

Awesome game. I loved the concept. it took me 3 tries to beat it :) the balance is pretty well done.

M2tias
 • 3 years ago • 

This is a fun card game idea! I like how a game mechanic is used to tell the story. Graphics are nice, but I'd like it if the whole game was single pixel size, if you use pixel art. But it didn't bother me that much in this game. All the sprites had a very easily recognisable look. The audio was good, music was interesting and ominous and the sound effects were fun but not too loud. Biggest annoyance for me was that I felt I was literally moving back and forth most of the game :D
Then when I finally made it far, there was no indication of how far I made it. I guess I just have to come back and finish it at some point.

DictorDro
 • 3 years ago • 

Oh, this is pretty original concept.
Liked this randomness… But unfortunately I haven't seen all cards because couldnt get so far. Maybe some dash movements or destroying cards needed at start.
Along with the music I really felt this dungeon-cave athmospheric, so good job!

Jokatti
(@jcatie) • 3 years ago • 

Wow this was tough! Cool mechanics and concept for this theme. I had multiple tries, but unfortunately couldn't make it to the end :D Music and audio completed the atmosphere nicely and with the random directions the character was definitely running around like a headless chicken :D

With the difficulty I felt, I'm surprised so many finished the levels! It did kind of feel like an endlessly generated tunnel, probably because I was really just moving that slowly. Makes me want to try again at some point to try and master it, so there's definite replayability with that!

It was definitely difficult to try and quickly gauge whether to go for the action cards or certain arrows or not and I probably wasn't skipping and narrowing it down enough.. all signs of the depth of the game!
Well done!

yozy
 • 3 years ago • 

What a great concept!

I found that combining lots of draw three + redraw cards made the deck a bit overpowered. Otherwise this was very fun, maybe the wounds could be more punishing or there could be a limit of actions to do per turn.

toasty
 • 3 years ago • 

A really strong entry - nice work! The concept is original and the gameplay intriguing, with lots of replay value and a punishing but not overwhelming difficulty. It took me a number of attempts to complete, during which I was forced to better understand the game, and (I think) discover all the different cards. The audio really complements the game and the graphics are simple but effective. Nice flourish with the card animations.

thomastc
  • 3 years ago • 

Thanks for the kind words everybody!

@M2tias

Graphics are nice, but I'd like it if the whole game was single pixel size, if you use pixel art.

I'd like that too ;) Had to rescale some things while figuring out the core gameplay, and never went back to redo the tilemap at the new scale. The pixels on the map are exactly 2x the size of the rest though, so in a sense those pixels are still on the same grid :)

Then when I finally made it far, there was no indication of how far I made it. I guess I just have to come back and finish it at some point.

I should have added a progress indicator. The distance is about 3.5 full screens. You'll know it when you see it!

Baconinvader
 • 3 years ago • 

Really awesome game! I'm a big fan of games featuring cards and I thought this one was really clever, and I also liked how you could actually win and it didn't just go on forever until you died (would have been pretty depressing). My main gripe is that I encountered a glitch early on which permanently placed 3 card sprites on my screen, which meant that sometimes it was something difficult to tell what cards I actually had, and there were some turns where I would have to just blindly spam all my number keys since I wasn't even sure what I was holding. Still a fun time though, it would definitely be neat to see this concept expanded upon.

thomastc
  • 3 years ago • 

@Baconinvader Sorry about that! Turns out the coding gets tricky if you want to animate things while also still accepting input. Probably I messed that up somewhere, causing bugs like this if you select cards before the animation is done.

Aurel300
 • 3 years ago • 

Nice game. Just played Slay the spire recently ^^ The concept allows for some interesting strategy, although I think it could use a wider variety of cards still, and maybe somehow a more "tangible" a foe than the RNG-based miasma. One small tweak I would welcome is if the hand was not discarded automatically if I have cards like "Draw 3 cards" left.

thomastc
  • 3 years ago • 

@Aurel300 Thanks! STS was indeed one of the sources of inspiration.

I had several more cards on the ideas list but no time to implement them -- every one you add requires rebalancing everything, from card spawn rates to worldgen.

Definitely hear you about the premature turn ending.

Tangible foes is something I'm trying to get away from in my games; there's plenty of combat in video games already.

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